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by ALurchyBeast 2792 days ago
IBM bought SoftLayer 5 years ago, and was unable to capitalize on their niche (bare metal). Instead they decided to double down on provisioning VMs, which SoftLayer was never that great at. The set of features IBM's VM's provides compared to any other modern cloud is terrible (headed backwards in Gartner charts). It's barely getting any better, meanwhile Google/AWS/Azure are gobbing on features.

IBM effectively failed in their integration of SoftLayer. They bought SoftLayer but failed to modernize them. Why will RedHat be any different?

Take a look at what's left of SoftLayer today. Most folks who had the necessary skills to keep their ancient php platform relevant have left a long time ago.

I'm sure IBM is on their 5th iteration of their "next gen" VM provisioning system by now, due out any quarter...
3 comments
rad_gruchalski 2791 days ago
Have they fixed their scheduler? For 5 years nothing has improved in the process of launching VMs. Sometimes it just barfs and goes to hell, requiring contacting support to terminate provisioning.

No joke, at one of the previous places we’ve implemented a task which would raise a support ticket via API if provisioning step was hanging for longer than x minutes. This is the case for years!

According to some people from IBM, the reason why IBM purchased SoftLayer was so they could tell their customers who were looking to move to the cloud „you want cloud, we have cloud” ... and keep the hefty support contract runing.

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WorldMaker 2792 days ago
More fatally than that, perhaps: IBM's business model for half-a-century at least including renting time on hardware at as close to commodity costs as IBM could push them (and still make a very healthy profit admittedly). The Cloud model was IBM's invention in a time where computers were expensive. IBM's failure to transition that very business model the company was built upon to a time where computers are plentiful, is like watching an Olympic swimmer forget how to swim in a lake.
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user5994461 2792 days ago
SoftLayer is not competitive. It was undercut by Google Cloud since last year, while AWS is not that far off.

Once everyone offers a choice of 1 TB Virtual Machines for rent, SOftLayer will be completely out of the equation. They're strictly worse in services and pricing.

https://thehftguy.com/2018/01/15/the-inevitable-demise-of-ib...

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